Daily Archives: June 27, 2019

By Sanjukta Paul – Where does economic power come from? Does it exist independently of the law?

It seems obvious, even undeniable, that the answer is no. Law creates, defines and enforces property rights. Law enforces private contracts. It charters corporations and shields investors from liability. Law declares illegal certain contracts of economic cooperation between separate individuals – which it calls ‘price-fixing’ – but declares economically equivalent activity legal when it takes place within a business firm or is controlled by one.

Each one of these is a choice made by the law, on behalf of the public as a whole. Each of them creates or maintains someone’s economic power, and often undermines someone else’s. Each also plays a role in maintaining a particular distribution of economic power across society.

Yet generations of lawyers and judges educated at law schools in the United States have been taught to ignore this essential role of law in creating and sustaining economic power.

Instead, we are taught that the social process of economic competition results in certain outcomes that are ‘efficient’ – and that anything the law does to alter those outcomes is its only intervention.

These peculiar presumptions flow from the enormously powerful and influential ‘law and economics’ movement that dominates thinking in most areas of US law considered to be within the ‘economic’ sphere.

Bruce Ackerman, professor of law and political science at Yale University, recently called law and economics the most influential thing in legal education since the founding of Harvard Law School.

The Economics Institute for Federal Judges, founded by the legal scholar Henry Manne, has been a hugely influential training program in the law and economics approach. more>

By Amy Hawkins and Jeffrey Wasserstrom – The dominant image of China in the West is of a closed, dark place; a country where what reigns supreme is an authoritarianism based on an ancient imperial past that today’s leaders claim to have renounced, while simultaneously extolling China’s 5,000-year history.

It’s not a wholly false perception, but the notion of China as a fortress state, impervious to foreign influence, is something of a smokescreen. So too – as the opposite but equally flawed assumption goes – is the perception of China as forever on the brink of being Westernized by the liberalizing forces of globalization and the free market, as if, whenever the fortress gates are opened, the country were barely capable of withstanding the influx of ‘contaminating’ or ‘corrupting’ ideas.

This idea of China received a powerful boost from Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ fantasy that the civilized world would converge around liberal democratic norms, leading many Western observers to believe that China’s economic boom and flirtation with freemarket forces was both inevitable, and would transform it completely.

In reality, China’s longstanding suspicion of foreign influence has not prevented the government or the people from becoming remarkably adept at marshalling the flow of overseas cultural touchstones into the country’s borders, remoulding them into something that isn’t entirely Chinese, but is also totally different from its original form.

Like authoritarian leaders everywhere, China’s are anxious about the population’s interaction with foreign ideas, and the state tries to police this closely, adapting cultural imports to fit national and regional needs. Still, the various ways that the government, villagers and city dwellers of different social classes and generations handle these mutations demonstrate that Chinese concepts of national identity are much more flexible than first impressions suggest.

Appreciating this is especially important now, as tensions between China and the United States rise. A strident form of Chinese nationalism is gaining ground. more>

By Arthur Pini – The eye diagram is a general-purpose tool for analyzing serial digital signals. It shows the effects of vertical noise, horizontal jitter, duty cycle distortion, inter-symbol interference, and crosstalk, all of which can close the “eye.” While engineers have used eye diagrams for decades, oscilloscopes continually get new features that increase its value.

Oscilloscopes form eye diagrams—the separation between the two binary data states “1” and “0”—by overlaying multiple single clock periods on a persistence display. The accumulation shows the history of multiple acquisitions.

Additive noise tends to close the eye vertically while timing jitter and uncertainty closes the eye horizontally. Duty cycle distortion (DCD) and inter-symbol interference (ISI) change the shape of the eye. The channel will fail if the eye closes to the point where the receiver can no longer recognize “0” and “1” states.

In the days of analog oscilloscopes, the eye diagram was formed by triggering the oscilloscope with the serial data clock and acquiring multiple bits over time using a persistence or storage display. This technique adds the trigger uncertainty or trigger jitter to the eye diagram for each acquisition. Digital oscilloscopes form the eye by acquiring very long record with many serial bits.

The clock period is determined, and the waveform is broken up or “sliced” into multiple single-bit acquisitions overlaid in the persistence display. In this way, all the data is acquired with a single value of trigger jitter that’s eliminated by using differential time measurements within the eye. more>

By Karola Klatt – In the wake of the financial and economic crisis, youth unemployment has skyrocketed in almost all industrialised countries, especially in southern Europe. When the impact on the labour market peaked in Italy in 2014, 42.7 percent of 14-25-year-old job-seekers were without work. In Spain, the figure was as high as 55.5 percent in 2013, while it stood at 58.3 percent in Greece in the same year.

Failing to secure a job means young adults face a hurdle right at the start of their independent lives. They remain reliant on their parents, boosting feelings of exclusion and helplessness.

It is a political as well as economic challenge, as those lacking prospects often veer towards extremist and populist movements. Anti-democratic attitudes commonly emerge from a context of personal crises: a sense of being socially excluded and an inability to improve one’s lot often triggers a rejection of the ruling system.

Switzerland, Norway and Germany have however not witnessed a dramatic increase in youth unemployment in the aftermath of the crisis. One reason for this, according to experts, is the success of the dual training system which is particularly important in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

In Germany, young people and young adults gain hands-on experience of their future professions in companies, while completing the theoretical part of their training in vocational schools. Ideally, trainees should be taken on by the training company after their apprenticeship. Where this is not possible, they can use the experience gained during their apprenticeship to apply to other companies, thus easing their transition to working life. more>